If you are like most people, you are so busy that it is hard to remember from one day to the next exactly what you ate!  You might be able to recall the contents of your bigger meals, but within five minutes of grabbing that chip off your coworker’s plate you have completely forgotten about it!  

Or maybe you found a mint in the bottom of your purse and popped in it in your mouth before an important meeting.  It is likely that the pressure of the meeting completely wiped that mint from your memory.  But it did not wipe it from your overall caloric intake:  The calories from the chip and the mint are still with you, even though their memory is long gone.

We are notorious for forgetting what we eat and incorrectly estimating our calorie intake.  But don’t take it too hard; even the pros don’t accurately estimate their daily calorie consumption.  When dieticians were asked to estimate their daily calories, they underestimated by a whopping 10 percent!  

But even though journaling takes a little effort and time, you may want to consider keeping a food diary, because it can have a profound impact on how much weight you lose.   In fact, researchers have found that the simple act of writing down what you eat and drink can literally double your weight loss!

In fact, researchers from the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research discovered that the single biggest factor in determining whether a person loses weight is whether that person writes down everything she eats and drinks in a food journal.  In the study, the number of days the participants journaled their food intake was directly related to how many pounds they lost.  In other words, the more days you use your food diary, the more weight you will lose.

Why does keeping a food diary result in such drastic weight loss results?  Probably because Journaling the food you eat gives you a realistic view of exactly how much food you are consuming.  It’s hard to guess the calorie content of food, and most people underestimate their caloric intake by about twenty-five percent.  But if you are writing it all down and noting the calories, there is little room for error.  Sometimes just the shock of how much you are really eating is enough to give you the willpower to pass by the donuts in the break room.

Not only does a food diary help you keep track of how much you eat, but it also gives you a clear picture of what you eat.  One person who thought she ate a lot of vegetables found out that she actually only ate them one or two times each week. Keeping a food diary brought this to her attention.  When you see precisely where your diet is lacking, you can then make corrections.

If you would like to double your weight loss numbers, try keeping a food journal.  Just be honest in your reporting and carry your journal with you, so you can write your food down as soon as you eat it.Visit site for more information